[Will S]

Quick reminder for those trying to guess the Viking bow type and weight - Ballinderry bow, dated to 10th Century Ireland was built exactly like the MR bows, as was the Viking Hedeby bow and both are estimated (as a result of replicas made using similar quality timber) to be around 150lb.

Ignoring these two in order to make assumptions that fit a predisposition is dangerous. We have Viking and Irish bows. We know their size and weight.

[Gabriele Becattini]

what we have are scandinavian bows found in irish context,

we cannot know for sure if they were used by native irish

for sure the dimensions and draw weights are very similar to the later examples of english war bow, this cannot be denied,

we may have different opinion on the draw weight but the two design are unquestionabily similar

but we have also the Waterford bow, that is a short bow,

I have just remembered that also a complete Arrow was found at Waterford that is 605 mm long (shaft and head together) this can say something about the draw lenght of a short self bow drawn to the chest

[Will S]

Opinions on the draw weights are somewhat irrelevant when regular, consistent replicas are made showing 140lb, 150lb, 180lb etc bows. Whether it fits a personal theory or not doesn't matter at all, because we actually know what poundage the bows were.

[Pieter B.]

Slightly unrelated to Viking or Highland bows but IIRC the bow Otzi the Iceman had was also an Italian Alpine yew longbow with a draw weight of 150 lbs. I believe Mark Stretton, Gibbs and local researchers pulled it through a CAT scan and built a replica. Pretty much identical to most MR bows in dimension except that it lacked the softwood belly and was all hardwood.

[Sean Manning]

[Will S]

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

Will, Strickland and Hardy give the Mary Rose average as 150-160lb and treat 150lbs as the standard English warbow weight. You just wrote that you think "120, 140, 150 etc were the common military weights," so I'm confused about how your estimates differ except perhaps for specific bows. Your common weights appear if anything lower than Strickland and Hardy's. I'm all for higher draw weight and heavy arrows based on my reading of 15th/16th-century sources on English bows and The Great Warbow tests. Speaking of those tests, do bows made from proper European yew shoot any faster than the bow Simon Stanley tested?

[Pieter B.]

[Will S]

[Paul Ballantyne]

Just to quote a few lines from the highly respected Mike Loades in his book "The longbow"

"I consider it unlikely that any but a few rare few would find the heaviest bows practical for battle"

further on

"Everyone will have his or her own opinion and, for what it is worth, mine is that the battlefield bows had draw-weights of between 90 lb - 120 lb around the beginning of the hundred years war and that these increased in the ensuing century to between 100lb to 140 lb, with the majority of archers shooting bows at the lower end of these scales.

The fact that people today can shoot bows of 170 lbs does not necessarily signal that this was a manageable weight in battle, nor does it lend credence to the notion that archers of this ability would be capable of sustained, rapid shooting with 120 lb or even 140 lb bows. They would be the elite, however, and by far the greater majority would be shooting bows nearer the 100 lb mark"


For my own opinion, that totally agree with Mr. loades.

The Mary Rose was the flagship of the fleet, would it be logical that the strongest, most impressive and elite of the army would have been aboard the flag ship when she sank ? Would the rest of the archers in the rest of the fleet be also using such heavy war bows ?

Btw does any one know offhand if they archers would have been allowed to use their own Longbows that they would have trained with on all those Sunday practice sessions after church. Or would they have been equipped with an issue Longbow and ordered to use the one issued ? Did they have a choice ?

On this note I will make this my last post on the topic, as I wish to keep the discussion friendly with an exchange of views and comments, I will however follow the thread and I enjoy everyones opinion of this topic and I am always open to new ideas and imput.

Cheers folks

[Will S]

Bowyers were requested to produce 2 meane wood bows for every yew bow. It's more than likely that these would be used for practice, while the expensive yew bows were sent to the armouries for livery use.

Meane woods such as ash, elm, hazel, holly, plum, cherry and apple all make superb heavy bows - I've just finished one myself from English ash based on Mary Rose dimensions but slightly smaller, which came out at 140lb before final heat treating.

Sadly, 140lb is clearly FAR and above what most people would be shooting (even though it's smaller than all of the bows ever discovered) so I suppose I had better reduce it to 100lb for "historical accuracy"

[Benjamin H. Abbott]

[Will S]

Sounds good to me!

150lb gets the job done. No matter what it is.

[Pieter B.]

How long do you guys reckon one would need to train for that?

I mean the basic English archer in many expeditions to France was paid a fourth of a man-at-arms, something along the lines of what a master carpenter could earn in a year. Though I think the archer had a slightly higher chance of getting dysentery or dying a violent death.

[Will S]

5 or 6 years of proper military archery training would do it. No distractions that a modern lifestyle suffers from, regimented and constant practice.

As Mark Stretton says, its not getting TO the weight that is difficult, its learning to control it.

[Michael Brudon]

I'd like to see footage of these average women firing 100lb bows myself.

In personal training I have only seen unusually strong women manage a one armed pull of 100lbs, and no amount of training gets average or weak girls there.

A woman weighing 100-120lbs lbs would be pulling close to her own weight in one hand...

That said I don't disbelieve there aren't woman pulling these bows, but I would to see the footage which may add a few conclusions. Coming from a military training background there is a big difference between a true average person, and the "average person taking a specialised interested in something athletic" -who are generally fairly athletic to take an interest in the first place.

Where can we see these average lady archers in action?

[Will S]

You'd have to attend a shoot. Not everybody films themselves.

There's no mention in this thread of "average" ladies by the way. It's fairly unusual for ladies to attempt that weight but it happens. I can name four off the top of my head (one of whom is Australian) and I've no doubt there are more. It's just not very common for ladies to attempt it, but those who do seem to get on very well.

There are also plenty of women comfortably shooting bows in the 80lb or 90lb range which is still far more than most men shoot today. I can say for a fact there are videos of a few women shooting 80lb bows on YouTube, and the lady from Australia has filmed herself shooting 110lb bows. You'll have to do some digging to find them but they're out there.

[Michael Brudon]

[Sean Manning]

[Will S]

Yep, but the trouble for most people interested in this stuff is all they have is old data from books written before better information was available instead of being able to see the bows actually being made and used in person.

The string testing happened only in the last two years. It will take many years for that to be recognised as "historical information" and while I agree that throwing stones gets us nowhere, Bickerstaffe has done a huge disservice to historical information by being so "respected" that his book published in a time of almost zero evidence is being taken as gospel.

The replicas of the bows using accurate timber are still being made and shot and broken and enjoyed everywhere but nobody is documenting them. Until that happens, the online discussions will forever turn to books that don't have all the information, or state facts based on badly made bows from the wrong species of wood claiming to be replicas and rely heavily on them because that's all they have.

Unless you're going to Warbow events, and talking to people like Joe Gibbs about what he's working on, you'll never know what's actually being discovered. These experts on bowyering, physics and ballistics of archery are only ever as good as the information at the time. Which was very little. Even Mike Loades' new book needs a huge amount of reworking already due to experimentation done since.